camore-lined main artery of the city—
Rustaveli Avenue. Each night during
the last week President Gamsakhurdia
an extraordinarily handsome and
charismatic man, a poet and scholar,
who has begun to show signs of intol
erance, insecurity, even paranoia —
has harangued the populace from the
bunker in the government building just
across the avenue where he is holed up
with his family and his personal guard.
His high pitched voice is projected
over loudspeakers far into the night,
night after night. Camped in ragged
tents in front of the government
building are scores of people from the
provinces who have been bused into
the city to support the president —
most of them are passionate old men
and women who look upon Zviad
Gamsakhurdia as the savior who will
restore the glory of the great Georgian
Christian empire of the 13th century.
They call themselves Zviadists after
their hero, who seems to crave their
idolatry. But they are a small minor
ity. Most citizens of the city of Tbilisi
have turned away from the president
by now.
On this beautiful October afternoon
you leave on foot from your hotel with
a friend who has come to guide you to
market. She is a young journalist, just
out of college, who two years before
had served as one of your translators
on an earlier visit to Tbilisi. Small
crowds are milling around on the av
enue as the two of you thread your way
through the picturesque, high-bal
conied streets..
Your conversation as you walk is
about the difficulty facing joumaUsts
in Georgia in the absence of any tradi
tion of press freedom.
An hour later, returning on foot,
you find the avenue in front of the
government house has been blocked
off by a phalanx of large buses and
armored vehicles. You have to detour
back to the hotel down side streets.
Your companion, sensing an impend
ing crisis, starts taking photographs
left and right. As the two of you
approach the front lobby of the hote
you see that the small crowds of an
hour ago have swelled many-fold. A
speaker with a megaphone is gathering
a large opposition crowd just outside
the line of buses protecting the gov
ernment house.
You are distracted by a flurry of
shouts and scurrying feet. Down the
sidewalk toward you comes an old
lady, clearly a passionate Zviadist,
carrying a home-made icon — a plas
ter of paris cross upon which she has
lovingly placed a photograph of the
president, surrounded by tin foil and
paste jewels. Oblivious to the fact that
there are hundreds of angry opponents
of the pre sident—mostly students and
intellectuals — in the street between
her and the safety of the barricade of
buses, the old woman is hurling curses
left and right. Her defiant words are
too much for a pack of the young men
in the crowd, who run up to her and try
to wrest away her icon. When she
resists, they start hitting her and drag
ging her along the street. The mood in
the street turns tense and ugly, like
your worst fear of being caught in a
subway station late at night when
violence erupts.
All of this happens so quickly that
you, the visiting American, stand there
flat footed, tempted to hurry into the
safety of the hotel but not willing to
abandon the vulnerable young woman
at your side. She, however, without a
second thought, abandons her jour
nalistic demeanor, shoves her camera
at you and takes off running to the
defense of the old woman, shielding
the woman from the blows of the crowd
of men, and leading her to the safety of
the buses. As you stand there, still
flatfooted, in front of the hotel, your
young friend returns a moment later,
trembling from adrenalin withdrawal,
eyes brimming with tears of anger and
wonder at her own audacity, saying
over and over to herself, “I can’t for
give that man Zviad for what he is
making us do to each other!
Later in the evening, beneath the
windows of your hotel room, Rustaveli
Avenue erupts for several hours into a
frenzy of pushing and shoving and
then machine gun fire and exploding
Molotov cocktails. Your windows like
others along the avenue are shot to
pieces as you hug the floor behind your
bed. An uneasy ceasefire arrives with
the dawn, but this is just a prelude to
the bloody civil war that will fully
erupt ten weeks later.
I have not been able to forget that
camera being thrust into my hands by
a young journalist whose humanity
overcame her so-called professional
training. I continue to be moved by
that image of her, surrounded by a
frenzied pack of young men — some
of them her own friends — as she
jumped forward, thoughtless of her
own safety, to preserve the life of a
probably demented old person whose
politics she strongly disapproved of.
Her act was not calculated. It was
certainly not prudent. But it was un
questionably a moral act of great power.
Unfortunately, such moral courage
is usually achieved only in hindsight,
rarely in such a spontaneously decisive,
selfless, and effective way. And here
we must make a careful distinction.
What I am calling moral clarity is not
the same as moral certainty. We must
learn to distinguish between clear-eyed,
keenly reasoned convictions rooted in
our sense of common humanity, and
those comfortable, complacent feelings
of self-righteousness that, as often as
not, divide us from others.
This moral clarity, I believe, is
something that can be cultivated. But
it takes a deliberate stretching of our
selves toward others, an active, willful
attempt to reach outside ourselves into
the lives and needs of others.
Let me bring us back now to the
present, to Brevard College in the early
fall of 1993, to the opportunity we
have together this year. This commu
nity is full of people who have such
capacity to make such a decisive dif
ference in the lives of others. They
may be your resident director or RH A.
They may be the person serving food
to you at the cafeteria or a secretary.
They may be your coach or your reli
gion or geology professor. They may
be you.